How Do You Know Someone Is Conservative? Meme

It is to the holding of the denizen, and not to the demands of the creditor of the state, that the start and original faith of civil society is pledged. ~ Edmund Burke

Conservatism is a political and social philosophy promoting traditional social institutions in the context of culture and civilization. The key tenets of conservatism include tradition, human being imperfection, organic society, hierarchy and authority and holding rights. Conservatives seek to preserve a range of institutions such as monarchy, faith, parliamentary government and property rights with the aim of emphasizing social stability and continuity while the more extreme elements chosen reactionaries oppose modernism and seek a return to a status quo ante.

Quotes [edit]

Sorted alphabetically by author or source

I am a Conservative to preserve all that is good in our constitution, a Radical to remove all that is bad. ~ Benjamin Disraeli

Conservatism proper is a legitimate, probably necessary, and certainly widespread attitude of opposition to drastic change. ~ F.A. Hayek

Isn't conservatism in role about resisting so-chosen new realities when you sense they might be questionable, even as people lecture you that you've got to go with the times? ~ Beak Kristol

What is conservatism? Is it not adherence to the erstwhile and tried, confronting the new and untried? ~ Abraham Lincoln

I never meant to say that the conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative. ~ John Stuart Mill

• Bourgeois, n. A statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from the Liberal, who wishes to replace them with others.
  • Ambrose Bierce, The Cynic's Dictionary (1906); republished as The Devil's Lexicon (1911)

• [T]he reason why I'k a conservative today is considering poverty is what I care about the most and bourgeois ideas have done more.
  • Arthur Brooks, interview with Beak Kristol (2015), transcript

• If conservatism is always to recover information technology has to achieve two large tasks. First, information technology has to find a moral purpose large enough to displace the lure of blood-and-soil nationalism. 2nd, information technology has to restore standards of professional person competence and reassert the importance of feel, integrity and political adroitness. When yous take away excellence and integrity, loyalty to the great leader is the only currency that remains.
  • David Brooks, "The Ascension of the Resentniks: And the populist war on excellence" (15 November 2018), The New York Times

• A conservative need not be religious, but a conservative cannot despise religion.
  • William F. Buckley, as quoted in "a+CONSE Upstream: The Ascendance of American Conservatism (2008), by Alfred S. Regnery, p. 335

• [C]onservatism is not supposed to be against change or progress... It is supposed to be skeptical of grandiose or reckless schemes which throw out the good in pursuit of the perfect.
  • "Who the Hell Exercise You Retrieve You Are?" (x May 2000), National Review

• A state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation.
  • Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)

• It is to the property of the citizen, and not to the demands of the creditor of the state, that the commencement and original faith of ceremonious social club is pledged. The claim of the citizen is prior in fourth dimension, paramount in title, superior in equity. The fortunes of individuals, whether possessed by acquisition or past descent or in virtue of a participation in the goods of some customs, were no part of the creditor's security, expressed or implied... the public, whether represented by a monarch or by a senate, can pledge zilch simply the public estate; and it can accept no public estate except in what it derives from a but and proportioned imposition upon the citizens at large.
  • Edmund Burke on fiscal conservatism, Reflections on the Revolution in French republic [1790] (London: Penguin Classics, 1986), pp. 207-viii

• They are the driven crowds that makes the army of the authoritarian overlord; they are the stuffing of conservatism ... mediocrity is their god. They fear the stranger, they fear the new idea; they are afraid to live, and scared to die.

• Donald Ewen Cameron every bit quoted by Harvey Weinstein in Begetter, Son and CIA pg. 101

• A Radical mostly meant a man who thought he could somehow pull up the root without affecting the blossom. A Bourgeois more often than not meant a man who wanted to conserve everything except his own reason for conserving anything.
  • G.Yard. Chesterton, in "The Evolution of Words and Meanings" in The Illustrated London News (3 July 1920)

• I am a Conservative to preserve all that is expert in our constitution, a Radical to remove all that is bad. I seek to preserve property and to respect order, and I equally decry the entreatment to the passions of the many or the prejudices of the few.
  • Benjamin Disraeli, in a speech at High Wycombe, England (27 November 1832); published in Selected Speeches of the Belatedly Right Honourable the Earl of Beaconsfield, ed. T. E. Kebbel (1882), book ane, p. eight.

• Why do right-fly women agitate for their own subordination? How does the Right, controlled by men, enlist their participation and loyalty? And why do right-wing women truly hate the feminist struggle for equality?
  • Andrea Dworkin, Letters from a State of war Zone, p. 194

• You know what a Tory is — ane who wants to drive the working men every bit he'd drive cattle.
  • George Eliot, Felix Holt, The Radical, (1866), Ch. 11, p. 121

• Is not every man sometimes a radical in politics? Men are conservatives when they are least vigorous, or when they are most luxurious. They are conservatives after dinner, or before taking their balance; when they are sick, or aged. In the morning, or when their intellect or their conscience has been aroused; when they hear music, or when they read poetry, they are radicals.
  • Ralph Waldo Emerson, "New England Reformers", lecture read before the Church of the Disciples, Amory Hall, Boston, Massachusetts (March 3, 1844); published in Essays: Second Series (vol. 3 of The Consummate Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson; 1903), p. 272

• From Disraeli to Oakeshott, conservatism has been defined for its distrust of ideology, and a preference for pragmatism, compromise and what has gone earlier. David Cameron has said he is Conservative because he recognises "the complexities of human nature, and will always be sceptical of grand schemes to remake the earth". Admittedly some Republicans are just equally hell-aptitude on ideology as some lefties, only the conservative philosophy is of scepticism, not visions.
  • L.S.S., "Keynes and Hayek: Adventures in Wonderland", in The Economist: Free Exchange (31 August 2012)

• The modern bourgeois is engaged in one of man'southward oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.
  • John Kenneth Galbraith, "Stop the Madness," interview with Rupert Cornwell, Toronto Globe and Mail (6 July 2002)

• The perils of modify are and so great, the promise of the most hopeful theories is and then often deceptive, that information technology is frequently the wiser part to uphold the existing state of things, if information technology tin be done, even though, in point of argument, information technology should exist utterly indefensible.
  • Robert Gascoyne-Cecil (Lord Salisbury), c. 1890, as quoted in A Question of Leadership (1991) past Peter Clarke

• [P]rogressives seem to think that conservatives distrust the regime because of some esoteric philosophical theory, or because we had some weird dream involving Ayn Rand. In reality, information technology'south considering we've been told to trust the government earlier — and we've gotten burned, time and fourth dimension again.
  • Jim Geraghty, "Ten Reasons Nosotros Can't, and Shouldn't, Be Nordic" (12 March 2018), National Review

• Why is it fair game to question conservatives' beloved or loyalty to children or to their fellow human being, but beyond the pale to question liberals' dear of country?
  • Jonah Goldberg, "Patriot Games" (21 April 2004), National Review

• The fashion you sustain and improve upon a culture is by fostering a sense of gratitude for what is all-time virtually it. You lot celebrate the good in your story while putting the bad in the correct context. Conservatism is gratitude...
  • Jonah Goldberg, "What's And so Great almost Western Civilisation" (xix April 2019), National Review

• There's a tremendous irony in the way conservatives take adopted their position on evolution. After all, the right has been complaining virtually relativism — the idea that there is no absolute truth — for years. Now, challenging the conclusions of science in the name of cultural tolerance, conservatives take created their own version of radical deconstructionism. Aping the French academicians they once excoriated, they're undermining the very idea of empirical reality, dismissing inconvenient facts as the product of an oppressive ideology.
  • Michelle Goldberg in Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism (2006) edited by W. West. Norton, p. 102

• Conservatism, though a necessary element in any stable society, is not a social programme; in its paternalistic, nationalistic and power adoring tendencies it is often closer to socialism than truthful liberalism; and with its traditionalistic, anti-intellectual, and often mystical propensities it will never, except in curt periods of disillusionment, appeal to the young and all those others who believe that some changes are desirable if this world is to become a better place.
  • Friedrich Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (1944), p. xi

• Conservatism proper is a legitimate, probably necessary, and certainly widespread attitude of opposition to drastic alter.
  • F.A. Hayek, "Why I Am Not a Bourgeois" (1960), The Constitution of Liberty

• Let me now state what seems to me the decisive objection to any conservatism which deserves to be chosen such. It is that by its very nature it cannot offering an alternative to the direction in which we are moving. It may succeed by its resistance to current tendencies in slowing down undesirable developments, but, since it does not signal another direction, it cannot prevent their continuance. It has, for this reason, invariably been the fate of conservatism to be dragged along a path not of its own choosing. The tug of war between conservatives and progressives can merely affect the speed, not the management, of contemporary developments.
  • F.A. Hayek, "Why I Am Non a Conservative"] (1960), The Constitution of Liberty

• Conservatives do not believe that political struggle is the virtually important thing in life... The simplest among them prefer fox-hunting — the wisest religion.
  • Quintin Hogg, The Case for Conservatism (1947), p. 10

• A conservative is someone who does not think he is morally superior to his granddaddy.
  • John Howard quote from The Howard Era

• I practise not know which makes a human more conservative — to know goose egg but the nowadays, or zilch but the past.
  • John Maynard Keynes, in The Finish of Laissez-Faire (1926)

• Information technology is non an accident that the Conservative Regime have landed us in the mess where nosotros observe ourselves. Information technology is the natural outcome of their philosophy:

  "You lot must not press on with telephones or electricity, considering this will raise the charge per unit of interest."
  "You must non hasten with roads or housing, because this will apply up opportunities for employment which we may demand in afterward years."
  "You must not try to utilize every 1, because this will crusade inflation."
  "Y'all must not invest, because how can you know that it will pay?"
  "Y'all must non do anything, because this volition only hateful that you can't do something else."
  "Rubber First! The policy of maintaining a one thousand thousand unemployed has at present been pursued for eight years without disaster. Why risk a change?"
  "We will non promise more than we can perform. We, therefore, promise nothing."

  This is what we are being fed with.
  They are slogans of low and decay—the timidities and obstructions and stupidities of a sinking authoritative vitality.

  • John Maynard Keynes, "A Plan of Expansion" (General Election, May 1929), published in Essays in Persuasion (1931)

• Isn't conservatism in part near resisting and so-called new realities when you lot sense they might exist questionable, fifty-fifty equally people lecture you that y'all've got to get with the times?
  • Beak Kristol, "All the same a Republican" (23 March 2018), The Weekly Standard

• [Conservatism:] Our revolutionary message … is that a self-disciplined people can create a political customs in which an ordered freedom volition promote both economic prosperity and political participation.
  • Irving Kristol, essay in American Spectator Magazine (1977)

• Lord Etheringhame's opinions were as hereditary as his halls; innovation was moral rebellion; the alter of a fashion, a symptom of degeneracy; he would as soon have destroyed his full-blooded equally his pigtail; and looked on every new patent, whether for a peerage or a pie-dish, as another stride to ruin; in short, he held just the contrary of the poet's opinion — with him, not whatever is, but whatever had been, was right.
  • Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Romance and Reality (1831), Vol. I, Ch. 4

• Y'all say you are conservative — eminently conservative — while we are revolutionary, destructive, or something of the sort. What is conservatism? Is it not adherence to the old and tried, against the new and untried? We stick to, contend for, the identical one-time policy on the point in controversy which was adopted by "our fathers who framed the Government under which we live;" while you with one accord reject, and scout, and spit upon that old policy, and insist upon substituting something new. True, you disagree among yourselves as to what that substitute shall be. You are divided on new propositions and plans, only you are unanimous in rejecting and denouncing the old policy of the fathers.
  • Abraham Lincoln, speech to the Cooper Found, New York, New York (27 February 1860)

• Conservatism is about protecting the fundamental rights: That we are all equal, regardless of the color of our pare, the faith that we practice or our gender.
  • Evan McMullin, as quoted in "Evan McMullin: Conservatives must now abandon the Republican Political party" (nine Nov 2016), past Josh Rogin, The Washington Post

• I never meant to say that the conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are by and large Conservative. I believe that is so plainly and universally admitted a principle that I inappreciably call up whatever admirer will deny it.
  • John Stuart Factory, in a letter of the alphabet to the Conservative MP, John Pakington (March 1866); this seems to have get paraphrased every bit "Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, only nigh stupid people are conservatives." which was a variant published in Quotations for Our Time (1978), edited by Laurence J. Peter

• The differentiation of conservatism rests on the estimate of necessity in any given case. Thus conservatism is purely an ad hoc affair; its findings vary with conditions, and are good for this mean solar day and train only. Conservatism is not a trunk of opinion, it has no gear up platform or creed, and hence, strictly speaking, at that place is no such affair as a hundred-per-cent conservative group or party … Nor is conservatism an mental attitude of sentiment. Dickens's fine onetime unintelligent characters who "kept up the barrier, sir, against modern innovations" were not conservatives. They were sentimental obstructionists, probably as well obscurantists, but non conservatives.
  Nor yet is conservatism the antithesis of radicalism; the antithesis of radical is superficial. Falkland was a great radical; he was never for a moment caught by the superficial aspect of things. A person may exist as radical every bit yous please, and still may make an extremely bourgeois estimate of the force of necessity exhibited by a given set of conditions. A radical, for example, may think nosotros should get on a great deal improve if we had an entirely different organization of government, and still, at this time and under conditions at present existing, he may have a strongly conservative view of the necessity for pitching out our system, neck and crop, and replacing it with some other. He may recall our fiscal system is iniquitous in theory and monstrous in practice, and be ever and so sure he could suggest a ameliorate i, but if on consideration of all the circumstances he finds that information technology is not necessary to change that system, he is capable of maintaining stoutly that information technology is necessary not to alter it. The bourgeois is a person who considers very closely every chance, even the longest, of "throwing out the baby with the bath-water," as the German proverb puts it, and who determines his conduct accordingly.
  • Albert Jay Nock, in 'A Little Conserva-tive' in The Atlantic Monthly (October 1936)

• To be conservative, then, is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the express to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss. Familiar relationships and loyalties will be preferred to the attraction of more profitable attachments; to larn and to enlarge will be less important than to keep, to cultivate and to savor; the grief of loss will be more astute than the excitement of novelty or promise. It is to exist equal to one's own fortune, to live at the level of i's own means, to be content with the want of greater perfection which belongs alike to oneself and one's circumstances.
  • Michael Oakeshott, On Existence Conservative (1962)

• Conservative ideology...may exist defined equally a philosophy of imperfection, committed to...the defence of a limited style of politics.
  • Noël O'Sullivan, Conservatism (New York: St. Martin'south Press, 1976), pp. 11-12

• The real sectionalization is non between conservatives and revolutionaries just between authoritarians and libertarians.
  • George Orwell, in a letter to Malcolm Muggeridge (iv December 1948), published in Malcolm Muggeridge : A Life (1980) past Ian Hunter

• What exercise we call conservative, and what exercise we call liberal, in daily life? A conservative explains behavior spiritually, and personalizes responsibility. In Aristotelian terms, the principle of move is within us. A liberal, by contrast, explains behavior mechanically, and externalizes responsibility: the principle of movement is exterior us. Thus, in the typical policy debate, a liberal makes excuses for the human agent, and a bourgeois places blame. The spark of the liberal argument — He didn't take the same opportunities you lot did — meets the conservative conceptual firewall: Lots of people start poor, but still find ways to make it.
  • Mark Riebling, in "Prospectus For a Critique of Conservative Reason (September 2009)

• Ever since 1953, when Russell Kirk produced its intellectual glaze of arms, conservatism has been "what Edmund Burke wrote." This is the equivalent of Arthur Danto's institutional theory of art — art is whatever the art world says it is. But it's too a cop-out. Instead of analyzing conservatism in an Aristotelian way, instead of asking how we use the term in real life, we just depict Burke. In the process, don't we take a chance fleeing into what Tanenhaus calls an "alternative universe"? If conservatives are "glaringly disconnected from the realities now besetting America," as Tanenhaus says, why is the solution to exist more like a man who wore a powdered wig? Liberals have problems of their own, only, to their credit, they don't sit around debating whether Hillary Clinton or John Edwards is the "real Rousseauian."
  • Marker Riebling, "Conservatism Turned Upside Down: Sam Tanenhaus' Critique of Conservative Reason," City Journal (16 October 2009)

• If motion conservatism is less about hating the state than about fighting Godless modernism, this might explain why conservatives take e'er institute actual or cultural wars to fight, but have never got around to shrinking or controlling the growth of government (though centrists like Eisenhower and Clinton did).
  • Marker Riebling, "Conservatism Turned Upside Downwards: Sam Tanenhaus' Critique of Conservative Reason," City Journal (xvi October 2009)

• Conservatism is a defence of established hierarchies, but it is also fearful of those established hierarchies. Information technology sees in their assuredness of power the source of corruption, decadence and decline. Ruling regimes require some kind of irritant, a grain of sand in the oyster, to reactivate their latent powers, to practise their atrophied muscles, to make their pearls.
  • Corey Robin, in interview with Henry Farrell, "Trump is a typical conservative. That says a lot about the bourgeois tradition." (1 February 2018)

• Conservative: One who admires radicals a century after they're expressionless.
  • Leo Rosten, as quoted in Ralph Louis Woods, The Modern Handbook of Sense of humour (1967)

• Conservatism is itself a modernism, and in this lies the clandestine of its success.
  • Roger Scruton, "Eliot and Conservatism", A Political Philosophy (2006), p. 194

• The conservative response to modernity is to encompass it, but to embrace it critically, in full consciousness that human achievements are rare and precarious, that we take no God-given correct to destroy our inheritance, but must always patiently submit to the vocalism of order, and prepare an example of orderly living.
  • Roger Scruton, "Eliot and Conservatism", A Political Philosophy (2006), p. 208

• The kind of Conservatism which he (Keith Joseph) and I...favoured would be best described as "liberal", in the old-fashioned sense. And I mean the liberalism of Mr. Gladstone not of the latter solar day collectivists.
  • Margaret Thatcher, Keith Joseph Memorial Lecture (eleven January 1996)

• The conservative in fiscal circles I take frequently described as a man who thinks nil new ought always to exist adopted for the first time.
  • Frank Arthur Vanderlip, From Farm Boy to Financier (1935), Ch. 25, p. 257

• The office of the leisure course in social evolution is to retard the movement and to conserve what is obsolescent. This suggestion is by no means novel; information technology has long been 1 of the commonplaces of popular stance.
  • Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) Ch. 8, p. 198

• Conservatism, being an upper-class feature, is decorous; and conversely, innovation, being a lower-class phenomenon, is vulgar. ...Innovation is bad form.
  • Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) Ch. eight, p. 200

• The fact that the usages, actions, and views of the well-to-exercise leisure class acquire the graphic symbol of a prescriptive catechism of deport for the rest of society, gives added weight and attain to the bourgeois influence of that class. It makes it incumbent upon all reputable people to follow their lead.
  • Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Course (1899) Ch. viii, p. 200

• The establishment of a leisure course acts to make the lower classes bourgeois by withdrawing from them as much as information technology may of the means of sustenance, and then reducing their consumption, and consequently their available energy, to such a point equally to brand them incapable of the attempt required for the learning and adoption of new habits of thought.
  • Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) Ch. viii, p. 204

• The struggle between the opponents and defenders of capitalism is a struggle betwixt innovators who do not know what innovation to make and conservatives who exercise non know what to conserve.
  • Simone Weil, in "The Power of Words" (1937)

• Like Aristotle, conservatives generally take the world as information technology is; they distrust the politics of abstract reason – that is, reason divorced from experience.
  • Benjamin Wiker, [ane]

• It merely takes 20 years for a liberal to become a conservative without changing a single thought.
  • Robert Anton Wilson, in The Illuminati Papers (1980), p. 111

Run into as well [edit]

Social and political philosophy
Philosophers	Ambedkar • Arendt • Aristotle • Augustine • Aurobindo • Aquinas • Aron • Averroes • Badiou • Bakunin • Baudrillard • Bauman • Bentham • Berlin • Burke • Butler • Camus • Chanakya • Chomsky • Cicero • Comte • Confucius • De Beauvoir • Debord • Du Bois • Durkheim • Emerson • Engels • Fanon • Foucault • Fourier • Franklin • Gandhi • Gentile • Gramsci • Grotius • Habermas • Han Fei • Hayek • Hegel • Heidegger • Hobbes • Hume • Jefferson • Kant • Kierkegaard • Kirk • Kropotkin • Laozi • Leibniz • Lenin • Locke • Luxemburg • Machiavelli • Maistre • Malebranche • Mao • Marcuse • Maritain • Marx • Mencius • Michels • Mill • Mises • Montesquieu • Mozi • Muhammad • Negri • Niebuhr • Nietzsche • Nozick • Oakeshott • Ortega • Paine • Pareto • Plato • Polanyi • Popper • Radhakrishnan • Rand • Rawls • Renan • Rothbard • Rousseau • Royce • Russell • Sade • Santayana • Sartre • Schmitt • Scruton • Searle • Skinner • Smith • Socrates • Sombart • Sowell • Spencer • Spengler • Spinoza • Stirner • Strauss • Sunday • Sun Tzu • Taine • Taylor • Thucydides • Thoreau • Tocqueville • Vivekananda • Voltaire • Walzer • Weber • Žižek
Social theories	Anarchism • Authoritarianism • Collectivism • Communism • Confucianism • Conservatism • Fascism • Individualism • Liberalism • Libertarianism • Republicanism • Social constructionism • Socialism • Utilitarianism
Concepts	Civil disobedience • Justice • Law • Peace • Property • Revolution • Rights • Social contract • Lodge • Tyranny • State of war
Forms of rule	Aristocracy • Hierarchy • Republic • Meritocracy • Monarchy • Plutocracy • Technocracy

External links [edit]

millerbostersair.blogspot.com

Source: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Conservatism

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